Gameplay will be similar to Guitar Hero / DDR and allows the player to customize the characters in various ways (i.e hats, glasses, ties, props, skin/fur patterns, etc.)
Menus are always a big part of any game and of course the main menu can make a big impact on players, depending on how interacting and well done it is. This is something I always kept in mind while working on the main menu and at some point I felt it was lacking in certain areas. So what could be done to spicen things up a bit more? I had a few ideas!
Particles are always something that can either make or break the immersion in the experience, while the previous ones were ok for what they were, they were always meant to be placeholders and it was about time i got rid of them and setup the final version.
Things like changing the characters skin, face emotion, accessories, etc. was my first main focus, considering it's something the player will probably do often, those particles needed to be smooth and feel nice with everything else. After some tinkering I was able to get the perfect particles setup and man it makes a huge difference, from quick snaps of updates to fully animated ones, the game just became a bit more interesting!
Another major thing i felt was lacking is the preview of the character prior to purchase, in the game you get 1 free character and the other two are purchasable, however the preview before was blocked by the purchase prompt and you could only see the character if you closed that prompt. This wasn't ideal.
Something more animated felt necessary and with that I added a 3D realtime preview of the character directly in the purchase prompt and completely re-worked the purchase prompt to work better with this new preview. This made the whole experience that much more enjoyable, being able to properly preview the character prior to purchase and decide "do i really want this?" is something i'm sure the players will enjoy much more.
Among other minor changes, de-creasing wait times in between menus felt like a big one as a lot of players might not want to wait for long animations, smoothing that out the menu flow feels a lot better.
After going over all that, lets see a detailed breakdown of what was changed/updated:
As the main menu development comes to a close, the next focus will be to finish making up the necessary levels for the game and actual in game UI for pausing and such.
New updates will come in the near future so keep an eye out for that! Thanks for reading!
This is a huge update providing a completely new save system (3 Separate Profiles), gameplay types, complete UI re-design and much more!